DALLAS – A House Republican representing the New York City suburbs is calling on Mayor Zohran Mamdani to skip the Sept. 11 memorial in downtown Manhattan.
“From my vantage point, I don’t think he should be there, and I think most New Yorkers agree that he should not be there,” Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., told Fox News and Fox News Digital. “Certainly, the 9/11 families and the first responders believe he should not be there.”
Political rancor is threatening to cast a long shadow over this year’s Sept. 11 remembrance events, marking 25 years since the tragedy that rocked the United States. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s past rhetoric and links to terror sympathizers are spurring intense backlash ahead of the city’s events memorializing the World Trade Center attacks, with Republicans and people whose lives were changed by the attacks demanding he not show his face.
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“I think Mayor Mamdani has proven himself to be a vile antisemite. I think he has associated with people who believe America deserved 9/11, and it’s not just Hasan Piker. If you go look at many of the people that support his administration, they agree with that rhetoric. They agree with that philosophy,” Lawler said.
An online petition led by family members of people killed on Sept. 11 — signed by over 100,000 people — has called on Mamdani to skip the memorial.
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“Mr. Mamdani has praised Brooklyn Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who has been linked to radical Islam, was named as an alleged co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and served as a character witness for the ‘Blind Sheikh,’ who was convicted in 1995 of plotting terror attacks against the United States,” the petition said. “Mr. Mamdani has endorsed candidates such as Aber Kawas, who described 9/11 as an attack ‘a couple of people did in the context of U.S. capitalism, racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia,’ and who also expressed sympathy for Ahmed Ferhani, who pleaded guilty to plotting to blow up a Manhattan synagogue.”
Mamdani and other socialist candidates’ association with far-left activist Hasan Piker has also seen intense scrutiny over Piker’s past comments that the United States “deserved” the attacks, remarks that he promptly walked back at the time but continue to haunt him and his political circle. Mamdani himself has also condemned the comment.
Republican Study Committee Chairman August Pfluger, R-Texas, told Fox News Digital that Mamdani should not attend Sept. 11 memorial events “until he can… actually call out terror groups around the world for what they want to do to this country, and that includes Hamas.”
Hamas was not responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, for which al Qaeda took credit, but Hamas has recently been front-and-center for perpetuating the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack in Israel.
“These people are really a cancer to the freedoms that we fought for, and they do not represent the American values that our founders set up and that we have had for 250 years,” Pfluger said of Mamdani and his allies.
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Both he and Lawler spoke with Fox News Digital on the sidelines of the 2026 GOP midterm convention in Dallas.
Mamdani’s office recently launched an online portal allowing city residents to access roughly 170,000 pages of local government records on Sept. 11, which appear to show city officials misled the public about air quality following the attacks.
Fox News Digital reached out to the New York City mayor’s office for comment.